How To Use Extrawatch Pro On A Pc Or Mac Or Mac (For A Web Browser)

Transcription

1 ExtraWatch PRO Documentation

2 Table of Contents What is ExtraWatch? What Are The Benefits of Using ExtraWatch?...3 2How to Use the Heat Map Feature Heat Maps and Latest Clicks Looking at the Charts Column Date Controls What Does The Heat Map Look Like? How to Use the Visitor Tracking Feature Seeing if a User is Logged-On Time of Session Sounds Per Visit Location on a Map Search Engine Traffic How to Use the Nightly Reports Feature How to Use the Anti-Spam and Blocking Feature Download Monitoring Download Referrer Restrictions Understanding Goals How to Create New Goals - What You Should Know Live Stats - Goals Integration How to Use the Traffic Flow Feature How to Use the SEO Report Feature How to Use the Graphs and Trends Feature How to Use the Database Status Feature How to Use the Directory Sizes Feature ExtraWatch Mobile App ExtraWatch Cloud Version...39

3 What is ExtraWatch? Whether you are using Magento, Drupal, Wordpress, Prestashop, or Joomla, it is incredibly important for you to track visitors and understand the trends and conversion rates for your site. ExtraWatch is a unique plugin that will allow any user to recognize just what it is that visitors are looking for, track visitors in real time, and have every piece of data that is necessary to test whether or not new posts, features, categories, and videos are working the way that you want them to. The goal of ExtraWatch is to compile every piece of information that you need in a single place, rather than having to resort to multiple tools or hire someone else to monitor it for you. With a single plugin, you have the ability to track social media links, click conversion results to test options and accelerate sales, numbers of downloads to understand different optimization techniques to increase them, effective areas for conversions thanks to a click heat map feature, SEO reports that are easy to read and show changes over time, and the flow of traffic between pages and sites You can also track spam attempts (and block them), nightly reports ed to you for an easy-to-read overview to start each day and live stat reporting that allows you to see statistics in real time throughout the day. That long list of features comes with the PRO version, although a free version is also available with very few features.

4 1.1 What Are the Benefits of Using ExtraWatch? The first thing that any website owner has to consider when tracking statistics is the value. Of course, there are people who would like to throw away money on assistants to sit and watch these kinds of statistics,but in fact, many of them will end up using software just like this anyway. That doesn t have to be a factor, thanks to ExtraWatch. This plugin has the benefit of coming with a one-time fee that pays for itself after a short time when used properly. This also means that you will be able to increase sales, downloads, click-throughs, and more with ease. The benefit of not having to guess when it comes to SEO and ad placement is invaluable and should never be underestimated. Something that you won t find anywhere else, but is highly beneficial, is the ability to monitor the information from your Android phone, no matter where you are. Many people obsess over their stats and will check them compulsively; well, this plugin lets you do it and still leave the house. 2 How to Use the Heat Map Feature Heat Map integration is, perhaps, one of the more useful functions in ExtraWatch. Basically, it will show you all of the areas that your users are clicking on your website. In the following sections, we ll learn more about it and how it works. The Heat Map feature of ExtraWatch shows a list of the pages with the most clicks out of all of the pages on your site. It tracks clicks in intervals of 1, 7, or 28 days. The general report lets you get a feel for the effect that changes to your site have. Ad placement, ad size, link size, link placement, menu placement, and more can all be changed and carefully planned in a way that captures the reader s attention and can be relied on to provide conversions.

5 Illustration 1: Heat Map Table The report shows: Clicks: This column color codes the number of clicks that each URL gets. The color on here will match the color on the actual map that we ll look at next. Title: These are the names of the pages. You can click on these to visit the pages and make sure you are checking the right statistics. Change Percentage: This measures the difference in clicks, measured in percent, for the past 1, 7, or 28-day cycle, whichever one you have previously selected. Charts Column: The chart icon to the left of the rows create a pop-up window that shows specific results for each URL on a daily basis. To print the report, you simply have to click the button in the upper right-hand corner. Depending on your computer configuration, you can opt to print to a PDF file, for easy sharing with clients or record storage, or print to a number of other files, in addition to paper. To utilize the best of the Heat Map features, take a look at the top of the page. Change the date to the specific period that you want to analyze.

6 Now click on a Page Title to open a new tab that features the Heat Map overlaid onto the page. You ll have to wait a few seconds for it to process. A yellow bar at the top of the page lets you know that it is processing. Once the Heat Map has loaded, you can press p to switch to the previous day, n for the next day, or t for a Heat Map that still allows you to use the website as a normal page. Look at the colors and areas that are colored in. These are the places that are getting clicks. The Heat Map is designed to resemble an infrared image and ranges from light purple to red. If you have a registration form, an advertisement, or a link that you would like to be clicked on, they should ideally be red, showing several clicks each day. Even on pages where there aren t specific targets, analyzing the Heat Map can show you what users are looking for. On pages of text, you might find that there are clicks on interesting pieces of information. That kind of information is what you should focus on providing to your visitors. Overall, going through the process of analyzing each page shows you what visitors are looking at the most, what they are clicking on, what pages have a high bounce rate, and how effective your advertising placement is.

7 2.1.1 Heat Maps and Latest Clicks Being able to determine where the latest clicks are on your website is incredibly useful as a site owner or a blogger. Below is a diagram of the Heat Map feature on ExtraWatch Pro: Illustration 2: Latest clicks refreshed in real time This feature is, perhaps, one of the best ways to keep track of the performance of your site. You ll be able to browse through recent clicks as well as your statistics since the beginning of your installation with the software. If you want a better understanding of this section, you ll be able to sort columns based on I.P. address, country, screen resolution, and a variety of others Looking at the Charts Column The charts column, as seen below, will show you information regarding the daily and weekly stats for certain pages on your website.

8 Illustration 3: Daily clicks Below each of the bars, you will see a change rate. Basically, this will show you the amount of change that has taken place over the course of a day and a week. The second row of this section will provide you with a graphical representation of the total amount of clicks that you received for that specific week of the year. Finally, at the top-right section of this same page, you ll see a print button. Printing the chart will allow you to have a copy of the report and provide you with the option of converting it to PDF for further editing or analysis. In the illustration below, you ll see what the print page looks like:

9 Illustration 4: Charts of Heat Map clicks over time As you can see, the Charts Column is incredibly useful, and is an integral part of ExtraWatch Pro that can t be overlooked Date Controls While you re still logged into the Heat Map feature, you ll be able to see the Date Controls section at the top of the page: Illustration 5: Date controls The Date Controls will allow you to sort through specific days and compare data in a relatively simple fashion. In image below, you ll see something called the Heat Map Overlay, which is basically a new tab that will appear over the regular page whenever you click on it. The second page will overlay the second, thus, showing you whether or not it is the correct information associated with the page. It looks like this:

10 Illustration 6: Address bar In the Overlay section, you ll be provided with three main functions of control: P : This will take you to the previous day. N : This will take you to the next day. T : This stands for Toggling and will show functionality for the links on your website What Does the Heat Map Look Like? Let s take a look at what the infrared Heat Map looks like, a feature that most would agree looks quite advanced and innovative. Remember that the colors will range from purple (which represents 1 click) to red (which represents several clicks). The image above shows you all of the areas that users on your website have clicked. As a general rule of thumb, always expect a higher degree of clicks on pages that require interaction (like an signup form or a contact page). Read-only pages, even if they re receiving a lot of views, may not bring up a lot of clicks mainly because there is nothing for the reader to do. However, this isn t to say that the feature can t be used on pages that don t have input fields. 3 How to Use the Visitor Tracking Feature This is one of the most entertaining options of ExtraWatch and is the function that is the easiest to obsess over. Many other plugins offer traffic reports to give you an overview of the data, but ExtraWatch actually allows you

11 to watch it in real time. This allows you to actually watch users and see how they are navigating, interacting, and reading your site. Viewing their behavior first hand is a great way to understand what is going on. Once you navigate to ExtraWatch, the first feature that is listed is Live Stats. The simple reason for that is because it is a comprehensive feature that is incredibly important to a lot of people who use this software. This is one of the stronger features associated with the software, as you ll be able to learn a lot of information about previous visitors as well as current ones. Although the dashboard may look scary, the truth is that it s relatively simple to understand. Below is an example: Illustration 7: Live Stats

12 At the top, you ll notice visitors who are currently visiting your website. The Green Dot will show if they are on or not, and the I.P. address next to their country s flag will indicate their geographic location. And as we ll read about later, the information to the right shows their most recent logins as well as the dates for those logins. Illustration 8: Live Stats Popup When you select it, you ll find yourself looking at a huge amount of information, like many of the tabs on here. Once you have an overview and learn how to navigate it, this will become one of the most fun parts of owning this software.

13 Illustration 9: Weekly Stats Just going through the Live Stats dashboard will quickly provide you with a lot of basic information on how your visitors are behaving. Where they are from, the URL that they came from, the keywords they searched for to find your page, etc. are all available in one place.

14 Illustration 10: Daily Stats To start, take a look at the left-hand side of the page. Scroll down and you ll see each visit from newest to oldest. All of this is listed without having to run any new processes, which is convenient for taking a quick assessment. As you scroll, keep in mind that each portion of the page is clickable, for the most part. More information on each visitor is available after you select them. The amount of time they spent on the page, the URL that directed them there, their IP address, their browser practically everything that you could possibly find useful.

15 Looking at this information also helps assess how your site is currently performing in the search engines. The Illustration 11: Daily Stats ctnd. keywords that you have optimized your page for should be the ones that visitors are finding your page through, for example.

16 3.1.1 Seeing if a User is Logged-On As you can see from the image below, there are currently 3 active visitors for the website. The number will be easily visible on the homepage of your dashboard and it will be green. Take a look at the screenshot below: As you scroll down, you ll be able to see all of the visitors who are currently on your website. To the left of their I.P. addresses, you ll see information regarding login frequency as well as actions taken. Zooming closer to the I.P. address (below), you ll also see the type of browser that the visitor is using. In this case, someone from Italy was logged in using the Chrome browser. Illustration 12: Green Dot To the left of I.P. address, you ll see information regarding actions taken on your website. You ll be able to determine what pages the user visited as well as whether or not they partook in some kind of action (like purchasing or downloading something). Note, when determining visitor frequency, you ll always want to look towards the top to see their most recent logins. In this particular example, the user was logged on, but if you look under their current login information, you ll see actions that they may have taken several days or weeks prior. As a website owner, this is incredibly useful information to have Time of Session Being able to determine how long a user has been on your site is also an important piece of data to keep in mind. On the Live Stats dashboard, you ll see a clock symbol with an amount of time next to it. This is basically the amount of time that the users was on your website. In the below example, you ll notice that the user was logged on for a total of 1 hour and 4 minutes:

17 Illustration 13: Session Time Sounds Per Visit ExtraWatch Pro comes with a handy little feature that will alert you whenever someone has logged on to your site or performed a function on it. This is actually useful and comes with some prominent benefits, including: Customization: You can change the sound of this feature so that it s more noticeable to you. As a result, you ll be much more likely to hear whenever a user chimes in. Efficiency: Without keeping ExtraWatch open on your screen, you ll be able to tell when users are interacting with your site. This will allow you to perform other tasks while still keeping track of performance. 3.2 Location on a Map On the right-hand site of the dashboard, you ll first see the Last Visit Map. This shows the location of your last visitor. It also displays the city and country where the visitor is from. More important than that are the other live stats.

18 Illustration 14: Location on a Map Unique visits, overall hits, page loads, and other information are broken down into day-by-day basis for easy analysis. Use this graph to see how many pages each visitor viewed, in addition to how many individual visitors you have had. The more pages your visitors are viewing, the more interested they are in your site. The Live Stats feature also lets you analyze very specific statistics in comparison to previous days. Expanding the charts and looking at individual parameters will allow you to see trends over time and understand the behavior of internet users coming to your site. Daily and weekly stats for a key phrase can help you judge when you will be seeing improved organic traffic. Finally, the ability to add goals helps you track your progress and see how close you are to achieving them. Click the small icon on the right hand side of the statistic for visitors, clicks, etc. and input a goal. You will be able to track the ups and downs and understand how much you are improving.

19 3.2.1 Search Engine Traffic If you d like to determine just how many visitors are coming from search engine traffic, then visit your homepage and scroll down to the bottom-right side of your screen. Here, you ll see a mini-dashboard that looks like this: Illustration 15: Search Engines Although it looks complicated, this graph is relatively simple to understand. For each day, you ll be able to see the percentage of individuals (in light blue) who visited your website. If you want to learn more about the traffic coming in from social media sites like Facebook, you d scroll down a bit further to see the following table: Illustration 16: Media

20 Not only can you see the number of visitors coming from Facebook, this dashboard will show you all of the visitors from Google and Google Plus. The total from all of these sources will be listed at the bottom of the graph. 4 How to Use the Nightly Reports Feature All of the live features of ExtraWatch are vital to having a complete understanding of your site s traffic, but it can be time-consuming and you can end up becoming obsessed with monitoring statistics during the day when you could be taking care of other things. Illustration 17: Report Settings In order to allow you to spend your days creating content, ExtraWatch creates nightly reports that will be ed to you automatically. Customizing the options makes it even more convenient and helps run the site without working too hard.

21 To begin, click on s under the Components menu. This will bring up a table that offers a number of options and ways to configure the reports that you receive. The check mark at the top of the page enables the automatic reports. The option below that is basic and allows you to enter the address where you would like the reports to be sent. _NAME_TRUNCATE is what allows you to change the number of characters that are in each row. Usually, this is just for specific programs that have trouble displaying the reports. The Value Filters change the values of reports and allow you to change the information that comes in each report, while ignoring certain pieces of data. Enter a 0 to deactivate the piece of information entirely. The SEO Reports option determines whether or not you will have SEO statistics included as part of the report. On the report itself, the variables will be sorted by popularity and largely represent the same kinds of information that you find in the dashboard. Pages, Referrer pages, key phrases, and location are the most popular choices people use for their reports, and are the easiest to measure in terms of effectiveness. If you experience a drop in traffic or conversion, it will show up in one of these factors before you notice a database issue that could cause trouble. Also included in the report is the percentage value of that page. The higher the value, the more important it is to the success of your site as a whole. For some people, this can be the main homepage, but others might have an affiliate offer that should be the highest converting and most popular. If, for some reason, other pages are becoming more popular, this report can help you decide what should change and where your focus should be shifted. It can all still be a little confusing if you aren t familiar with each page of the dashboard. Familiarize yourself with each part of ExtraWatch and the reports will make much more sense. Once you understand everything, the report will act as a summary of everything before starting your day. That way, you can understand what to do, what you should try, and how you can improve different aspects on a day-to-day basis. 5 How to Use the Anti-Spam and Blocking Feature Blocking spam and eliminating problematic visitors can t be stressed enough when you are running a popular website, if you hope to have any success. This page doesn t look much like the other pages on the dashboard, although it is just as easy to get the hang of if you know what you are doing. Blocking spam serves more than just stopping weird comments from coming in. Spam can flood your pages with phishing links, illegal content, and turn readers away from your posts. Spam can also tax your server and

22 result in slow load times and sites going entirely offline. Not everyone has to worry about a large volume of spam, but as your site becomes more popular, it becomes more and more important to take charge. Illustration 18: Anti-Spam Screen In ExtraWatch, click on Anti-Spam and navigate to the dashboard. There won t be much information there if you haven t used it before, but filling it in is easier than you think. On the lefthand side are blocked IP addresses. These come from violating anti-spam policies, hacking attempts, and other malicious actions. The right-hand side contains the Bad Words that trigger the spam feature. You can learn more about each section below: IP Addresses: ExtraWatch automatically monitors and bans IP addresses that cause trouble. Repeated attempts to spam your site will result in them being listed in the column and can be manually unblocked if you think that there was an error. Many site owners monitor these lists and eventually block entire countries from accessing their site if there is an extremely large amount of spam or attacks coming from it. This is normally not applicable to comment spam, however, and is usually reserved for more extreme

23 measures like hacking and DDOS attacks. Still, it is something to consider if your site runs into a specific problem. Spam Words: These bad words are words that most usually accompany spam. You enter them yourself, but lists are available online that can give you a start. Thinks dealing with making money, sexual activity, or drugs are usually a good place to start. Things like Cialis, Viagra, dollars or from home should give you an idea of what to look for. These are the most commonly spammed comments and are usually centered on how to get rich quick or improve male sexual health problems. The important thing to keep in mind with these words is that some might not be the most effective and might block innocent users. Over time, you can whittle down the list and improve it to target the kinds of spammers that attack your particular site. Be aware also that ExtraWatch blocks users if they use a large word that contains the banned word, even if it is unrelated. In closing, make sure that you put the anti-spam agent icon before any of the content on your site. It s easy to do and if you set it up properly, it will automatically be in the proper position every time you enter new content. This makes sure that if someone attempts to spam your site, the page will not load again. 6 Download Monitoring Being able to keep track of the amount of downloads that users are partaking in on your website will provide you with a lot of feedback about whether or not you are doing things right. More and more sites these days offer file downloads that can come in the form of free product samples, audio and video files, and more. If you are going to go through the trouble of creating these files or hosting them, don t you want to know how many people are actually downloading them?

24 Using the Download Monitor is simple and only requires you to select the kind of file extensions that you would like to track. This can be zip, rar, pdf, mp3, or whatever kind of file you are uploading. The plugin will do the rest of the work for you and create the charts that let you track the download numbers. Selecting the Downloads tab in the dashboard provides you with graphs and charts that tell you important information about the downloads, along with the number of downloads in recent days and weeks. Two separate graphs are shown on the dashboard. The top graph tracks files from day-to-day and shows recent changes, while the lower graph shows the numbers over months. In addition to those two graphs, an easy-to-read chart with multiple columns is shown at the bottom that will tell you the name of the file, the downloads today, downloads yesterday, the previous week, months, and total download numbers. All of these can be sorted in different ways: according to alphabetical order, total downloads, and downloads for each length of time. ExtraWatch includes different colored lines to represent each file. This makes the charts especially easy to read when you have a site that heavily relies on file downloads. If you are receiving fewer downloads than you would like, you can combine this information with the Heat Map and understand exactly what you can do to get more downloads and get the most out of your hard work.

25 In the screenshot below, you ll see a dashboard that demonstrates that total amount of daily downloads for recent month. Note, they are color-coded and the line graph will represent, visually, just how many downloads are being achieved: If you re interested in seeing your total amount of downloads for the week, then simply scroll down a few inches. In this section, you ll see the month followed by the particular week. Again, this section will be colorcoded to help separate the different downloads that you have: Let s say that you d like to dive even deeper and acquire more information about the number of downloads on your site. Well, that s relatively simple. Looking at the following image, you ll see a download column that will show each individual file. Next to it, you ll see that file s performance based on: Today, Yesterday, This week, Last Week, This Month, Last Month, Total Downloads

26 Illustration 19: Download Monitor Paths This section will help you break down each of your individual downloads so that you can see which one is performing better. 6.1 Download Referrer Restrictions Whenever you own a website, there may come a time when you want to protect a download area. When this occurs, you ll want to take advantage of ExtraWatch Pro s handy feature, Referrer Restrictions:

27 Illustration 20: Referrer Restrictions Basically, this section of the software will allow you to set the address from which you want your files to be downloaded or observed. If you don t do this, all of your files will be allowed for download by default. This is quite handy if you want to protect your files to be available for download only from specific URL.

28 7 Understanding Goals A very effective way of enhancing the overall efficiency of your website is to keep track of your site s goals. In ExtraWatch, Goals refer to a feature that you can use to measure success on your website. You ll be able to view specific performances for any of the following goals: Whenever a user submits a form Whenever a user clicks on a specific page on your site Whenever a user partakes in a specific action on your site (leaving a comment, downloading a manual, etc.) Take a look at the screenshot below to see how this feature looks when logged into your account: Illustration 21: Goals If you re going to use this feature effectively, you need to understand how it works. You ll want to familiarize yourself with the various features of the goals section of the software so that you can create your own goals and measure their success on your site. Don t worry if it sounds a little complicated. In the following section, we ll show you how to create a new goal in ExtraWatch Pro. 7.1 How to Create New Goals - What You Should Know Clicking on the words New Goal will immediately take you to a page where you can input a variety of fields:

29 Illustration 22: Goal Insert If you ve never seen the terms GET Variables or URI Conditions before, then you ll probably be a little intimidated. But the good news is that they are relatively simple to understand and with enough practice, they can be mastered in no time. Let s take a look at some of the fields you ll encounter: Name: This is where you want to enter the name of your goal. This can be anything that you want. Just make sure that it helps you remember what the goal is so that you can refer to it later.

30 URI Condition: This stands for Uniform Resource Identifier and this is basically another name for a URL. You could use this section to right something like /Downloads*, which would ultimately show you how many users are downloading your specific item within a certain amount of time. Inverse Conditions: Below this section, you ll see one that reads Inverse. Basically, this box is designed to reverse the process. For example, when you click it, your new goal would apply to all except your downloads (when referring to the previous example). This is a great way to exclude certain areas of your website from the statistics. You can, for example, create a goal which will block everyone except those visitors which are from your country. As you can see, goals play a huge role in ExtraWatch and can ultimately allow you to more accurately measure your site.

31 7.2 Live Stats - Goals Integration If you d like to see just how much users are interacting with your website, be sure to check out how many goals they are achieving. In the example below, you can see that the user reached the download button as well as reached the menu purchase goal. Being able to create and keep track of your goals are an integral part of the live stats dashboard. To be a little more specific, let s take a look at an example of when a download was reached. In the screenshot below, you ll see that this particular user downloaded the pre-specified file. Remember that you can set your own goals and later measure them to see just how well your website is performing. 8 How to Use the Traffic Flow Feature A lot of other pieces of software can export raw data, but without visual representation, it can be hard to get a good look at what is going on with the flow of traffic on your site.

32 Illustration 23: Traffic Flow Select the Traffic Flow section and take a look at the graph. This graph represents the flow of traffic through your site. It looks a lot like a road map and shows the paths leading out of the root. The root is the page that you select to focus on. Each path leading out of it shows where people are clicking away to. If you have a certain product, resource, or link that you are attempting to get people to click on, this map will show if you are succeeding in that. In order to get the most out of the traffic flow map, you should customize it to fit your needs. Choose Select Page for starters. After choosing this option, you can alter the root page and find out how your traffic flows out of it to other portions of the site. The most popular option is to set it to your homepage for generalized data. Once you start to become a more advanced user, you ll want to begin viewing the data from different pages to learn as much information as possible.

33 Next you can take a look at the eagle-eye view mode that is seen when you change options in Nesting Level and Root outgoing links count. As you increase the Root-outgoing links count in the drop down menu, you ll see many more pages that make up the traffic flow. The nesting level option serves a similar purpose. From the drop down, the higher you raise the level, the deeper you will see into the flow of traffic on your site, while still being able to see the original page that you are tracking visitors from. The higher you set it, the more complicated it will look, although it will also provide a one-of-akind look into your traffic flow if you know how to look at it. In order to use any of this information on your own site, you ll need to analyze the data. This isn t the end of the road, just a statistic to use when you look at other factors. Take the traffic flow into account with things like the Heat Map to get an idea of why traffic flows the way that it does. The Heat Map can show you where people click, while the traffic flow shows you where they are actually wanting to go. 9 How to Use the SEO Report Feature Search Engine Optimization is one of the most important aspects of site design and will ultimately determine how much faith the search engines have in your page and how easily readable and navigable it is to your visitors. The bots that search engines use like to have an easy job and proper SEO makes sure that they do. Illustration 24: SEO Report

34 Clicking on the Search Engine Optimization tab can provide you with pieces of information: Most Popular Keyphrases: ExtraWatch PRO on each visit, detects a keyphrases that users used on search engines to find your website. If all of that checks out and is up to standard, you can look at the more detailed SEO report tab and take a look at your site s performance. The SEO tab shows the URLs that are most popular and the ones that are followed by visitors, the phrases and keywords that they used to get there, and specific information for each piece of data. Take a look at the SEO Report and see which URL is the most popular, the number of visitors, the change over time, and the search result number. From here, you can improve certain pages that are not performing well, or focus on increasing the profitability of pages that are ranking well. Important here is to take a look at the Count column. This is how many people found the page with the same keyword or keyphrase. These can be the most powerful pieces of information that you can possess. If the keyphrase is popular, but not very profitable, consider research to find a more profitable one. On the other hand, if it can create high conversions, ignore other keyphrases and focus on that one for each particular page.

35 The final part of the tracking that is most convenient is the fact that you will simply check your each morning for a report to go off of for the day. Select the s tab and input your default to start getting reports automatically sent to you. 10 How to Use the Graphs and Trends Feature The Graphs and Trends feature in ExtraWatch provides a way to visualize the context of all of the statistics that you ve been gathering through the many dashboard features. With this feature, you can see how your site is performing today, but also how it looks over time, even weeks worth of trends. On ExtraWatch, select the Graphs option to get a look at the visual representation of your site s performance. Whatever aspects you choose to measure will be shown from left to right, along with any goals that you ve set for the variable. Blue bars represent the goal actions that you ve designated for each day that you are monitoring. Take a look at a bar independently, without worrying about the other bars. This bar is a measure of the traffic statistics for each day. Above the bar, there is a number that represents the number of hits that this page has had today. Below the bar, you ll see a percentage that represents the change from the day before and can help to track trends in visitor patterns. To put it simply, red percentage is down and green is up. Under the initial chart, you ll find a second graph that shows the same results, based on weeks rather than days. Above the bar graph, at the top of the page, you ll also find a dropdown menu that allows you to select the kind of information that will be applied to the graphs. Overall, though, the data in the graphs will be fairly consistent no matter what you select. The performance is uniform in many cases, regardless of what you are looking at. Through that dropdown menu, however, you can select options like: Key Phrase: The phrase that referred visitors to the page User: Track registered users and how often they access the site Country of Origin: Where the visitor is accessing your site from IP Address: The address of the computer that is being used to access the site Browser: Whether they are using Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, etc. Goal: The number that you are attempting to reach for success Referrer: The site that the visitor accessed your page from

36 Keyword: The keyword that was used in Google to find your page Database Size: The size of different database tables on the page URL: The most viewed pages of your site All of this information is available elsewhere on the dashboard, but viewing it as part of a graph like this is still important. Seeing all of the information in context and viewing trends over time helps judge the long-term performance of different aspects and assess recent problems that you might be having. Bringing all of this information together gives a one-of-a-kind comprehensive view of your site s statistics and visitor information. Every aspect of your site has an impact and with this plugin, you can optimize every single page to get the maximum return on your efforts.

37 11 How to Use the Database Status Feature Database sizing is one of the most confusing parts of running a website, especially for those who are doing it for the first time. It doesn t have to be hard when you have ExtraWatch. You re going to monitor this for a number of reasons, primarily the amount of data. Illustration 25: DB Status

38 Click on the Database Status page in ExtraWatch to get a look at what we re talking about. This takes you to the main Database Status report that offers all of the information pertaining to database size and changes to that size. There is a lot of information here and it can be hard to understand it all if you aren t familiar with it. The first column is the name of the database table that each measurement is monitoring. The second column reads Records and isn t really something that you can control since it is a value of the database table The third column is Size and is what you need to take a good look at. The larger it is, the more space it takes up on your web hosting, abd the longer backup of this table will take. The changes take up the next three columns, but in the interest of optimization, you shouldn t be worried about them right now. If you think that something strange is happening and certain tables are rapidly increasing in size, however, this can be a convenient way of tracking that by looking for exponential size gain in the past week or month. The final column contains a graph icon that you should click on and see a graph of all of the statistics Scroll down to see the actual size of each Database Table in an easy to read graph that can be used to quickly assess the size of each and which ones are getting out of hand. This is important. Illustration 26: DB Status Chart

39 It is designed to be easy to read and display the table, rows, and database size. Clicking on the headings will allow you to sort by size or alphabetical order. If you have a lot of tables, it might be easier to stick with one or the other to remain consistent. This feature primarily serves that purpose to let you know the size of each table. Through the plugin, you can t directly modify any settings and make real changes, but you can keep an eye on your information and know what to fix elsewhere. 12 How to Use the Directory Sizes Feature The Directory Sizes page is similar to the Database Status page in that there is a lot of information here that you might, or might not, understand, and there aren t many opportunities to actually change anything. Similarly, this isn t something that many website owners check, but it can be an invaluable tool when assessing the overall health of a site, even though it isn t normally included in site reports. It might not be exciting information and the things that you know directly might not translate to sales, but this all remains important. Illustration 27: Directory Sizes

40 You probably have plenty of practice navigating the different pages by now, but it is always worth repeating: to get here, select the Components module and navigate to the Modules/Component Sizes link in ExtraWatch. The Components dropdown menu from any ExtraWatch pages works as well. Once you find the page, the first thing you ll see above the table on the left is a section for Alerts. This box tells you the last time that you checked this information. Below that, the BLUE alert tells you that the components and modules that are listed below, when colored Blue, are part of the administrator directory. For most uses, that information is what is important and will be most commonly searched for. Below that, you ll see two tables side by side. The left table gives you information on various components, while the right table is designated for modules. They re listed in alphabetical order, not size, so make sure that you are careful when looking for information. At the bottom of the table, you ll also find the total size for the components or modules. If you know that every component is optimized, this is simply the measurement that you can watch to know if there are any changes that have taken place. That will require refreshing all of the components and modules, but we ll cover that next. Looking at the tables, you ll see three different columns. The component name, the component size, and an icon that allows you to refresh the data. If you need to refresh all of the information, you just have to select the triple refresh icon at the top of the table. In most cases, though, you ll only be checking one component at a time and won t have to take the time and resources to refresh all of the measurements. It takes several seconds to assess each component, so refreshing all of them is disabled by default, allowing you to only see the information you need. Reviewing this kind of information isn t something that most site owners do on a regular basis, and it isn t a part of most performance reports. However, it is something that contributes to having a full, comprehensive look at the health of your site. If you find yourself needing to check this kind of information, quickly assess the problems and get your site running at its best. 13 ExtraWatch Mobile App The ExtraWatch Mobile App is incredibly useful, and will provide you with all of the benefits of the software from your smartphone or mobile device. Here s what it looks like: As you can see, the layout is clean, minimal, and protected. You can access your account via WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla, and all of the components from the regular software will be included. Once logged on, you can see your homepage preferences so that you can be directed to a certain page automatically.

41 Configuration items include username, password, admin folder name, the URL of your website, and the name of the component that needs to be opened (which is optional to the user). 14 ExtraWatch Cloud Version Did you know that ExtraWatch live stats can also be hosted in cloud? Some of the benefits associated with taking this route include: Simplicity: Simple copy-and-paste of a few lines of HTML code. You won t need to download any kind of extension. Effectiveness: It won t slow down your website s performance. Tools: It provides both SEO reports and nightly , both of which are very useful when analyzing your site s stats. The cloud version is another great way to take advantage of all that ExtraWatch Pro has to offer.